


Safe as Houses

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 10000-30000 words, Backstory, Drama, Episode Related, Episode Tag, Episode: s01e07 Cold Lazarus, Episode: s03e19 New Ground, Established Relationship, F/M, Grief, Het, How it should have happened, Loss, Marriage, Reconciliation, Romance, Season/Series 03, Secret Relationship, Secrets, Team, career choices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-04
Updated: 2009-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-02 16:11:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Truth has consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safe as Houses

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2009 Jack/Sara Ficathon. Post-ep for S3 'New Ground,' set roughly two and a half years after 'Cold Lazarus,' six weeks after 'A Hundred Days,' a month after 'Shades of Grey.'  
> Betas by Skippy and Cowardly Lion.

For the dozenth time, as Jack started to close his locker with its prominent pictures of Charlie and its prominent-to-him lack of pictures of Sara, he glanced down at the cigar box at the bottom and fought an impulse to dig his wedding ring out and slide it back on. Used to be a habit to reach for it, took a long time to break; now it was a yearning so strong that his hand physically twitched. He didn't think anyone noticed; they were talking about what would happen to Nyan, what would happen back on P2X-416, whether he'd be happy here, whether he'd ever get to go home. Jack closed the steel door quietly and spun the lock and turned.

"Among Jaffa," Teal'c was saying, "the mentor-protégé relationship is far more personal than what you have proposed, Daniel Jackson."

"He's not my protégé, he's my research assistant, and I don't know if he needs a mentor," Daniel said. "Of course I'll be more than his boss -- I'll help him any way I can. But I can't be his Bra'tac. We can't adopt them all."

"_We_ have not yet adopted any," Teal'c said, looking half stony and half frowny. "I owe a debt to this young man, but I cannot repay it as I would, for he is not bound for training in my discipline and I have no home to welcome him into."

Jack didn't think this was about Teal'c being stuck in quarters while yet another offworlder was helped into topside housing. Teal'c had told Hammond several times that he was content where he was -- preferred barracks living anyway, liked being in first-responder range of the gate, home was on Chulak -- and not to waste time doing battle with higher to get him approved for accommodations in town. Jack didn't think it was about the powers that be trusting someone new to have more discretion and loyalty than Teal'c had proven to have. It was about Nyan's proven loyalty to Teal'c, and what Teal'c felt honor-bound to offer in return. It was about this being as personal for Teal'c as Cassandra had been to Carter.

Jack tried to catch Daniel's eye, but Daniel was irritated at being guilt-tripped and was focused completely on Teal'c, and Carter was rummaging in her own locker and probably her own issues about not taking Cassie. He started to interject something about how it was different from Cassandra because Nyan was technically an adult, but Daniel put his personal annoyance aside and addressed Teal'c's concerns more directly. "In Nyan's culture, as in my culture, vocational training doesn't involve fostering. But he might appreciate an invitation to share your living space. Ask him, and if he says yes we'll cancel tomorrow's meeting and talk to the general about alternatives. You could move into one of the isolation suites, maybe -- treat it like an apartment. Or we could push for you to move out into town. We've never pushed on that. If you want us to, we'll push."

He cast Jack a _Right, Jack?_ look, and Jack nodded and said to Teal'c, "Pushing available anytime. You say the word, we push."

After a few moments' consideration, Teal'c nodded. He didn't say anything else; this was the point in conversations with Teal'c where Jack wasn't sure if that was it, or Teal'c was mulling over the ramifications and would have more to say in a few minutes, or what, and he looked at Daniel and Daniel looked back and shrugged with his face.

Carter came to the rescue, saying, "Don't cancel the meeting, though," closing her own locker and turning to Daniel. "It's not just logistics, it's transition counseling, isn't it?"

Daniel nodded. The meeting tomorrow morning was with the social worker assigned to Nyan's case when the Air Force granted him refugee status, one of the professionals the Program had accumulated who specialized in supporting displaced people. Daniel had vouched for the guy, said they worked pretty closely to relocate the Edorans who'd come through the gate, back when it looked like they weren't going home for a while or maybe ever.

"He's still going to need that," Carter said. "Nothing like it was available to Cassie at the time, and it would have been a big help."

"Of course," Daniel said, "yes, I should have thought." He smiled, wryly and a little tiredly -- they'd been through the wringer on P2X-416 and needed some real R&amp;R, not just medical attention and food and enough sleep to set their clocks back to Mountain time -- and said, "I could have used some myself. Might even have helped you, Teal'c."

"The three of you have proved amply sufficient," Teal'c said, with enough indulgence in his voice and his eyes that Jack relaxed inside and felt Daniel and Carter relax too, knowing that it was OK now, solution in progress, all back on the same page. "But I am grateful for what your specialists can provide. I will present my offer to Nyan before the meeting in the morning."

They were done here, all changed into civvies, even Teal'c. Carter said, "In the meantime: Italian?," even though Jack was pretty sure she wanted nothing more than to get home to her twenty-seven personal computers, and Teal'c was obviously headed for kel'no'reem, and Daniel was shifting books from locker to knapsack to curl up with in his loft. She was putting the team first, suggesting a shared off-duty meal before they went their separate ways to decompress.

"Prior commitment," Jack said -- only a little regretfully, because he appreciated Carter's instinct but as he assessed it they needed the private decompression right now more than the food bonding.

"A date, sir?" Carter said, pure teasing -- not fishing, not anything but maybe ribbing him a little for having no discernible personal life whatsoever, well-deserved payback.

"Something like that," he said -- and immediately added "But you kids go on if you want" and some bullshit about what his grandmother always said about the restorative powers of pasta, because he shouldn't have said that, dammit. What the hell was wrong with him? What happened to the simple chuckle and "Yeah, right"?

Carter went big-eyed and said "Oh my god, you have a date!" and looked to Daniel and Teal'c, two eyebrows and two more eyebrows and one eyebrow raised respectively, a kickline of raised eyebrows for cryin' out loud --

And suddenly he was so fiercely fond of all of them that he was _this close_ to just spitting it out, no good reason he hadn't all this time, must want to on some level to slip like that and set himself up for it, just three words, _I'm seeing Sara_, that's all it would take, and then they'd say _Seeing seeing, or just seeing?_ and he'd say _Seeing seeing, since a few weeks after the crystal thing, didn't want to jinx it but what the hell, it's going pretty well and you might as well know_ \--

"Yeah well whaddya gonna do," he said instead, half wincing.

Carter replied, "You're not gonna hang around _here_ anymore, that's for sure, sir," and Daniel said, "Wow, Jack, seriously, go," and Teal'c said, "May you have a most pleasant evening, O'Neill," and that was it -- his unit dismissal.

In the truck heading down Norad Road, he tried to put the mission away. He called Sara to find out what he should stop off to pick up, tuned the radio to a sports talk show. He kept thinking about Nyan -- exiled from his home, his girl, his own beliefs. Maybe it was destiny for Nyan too, the thing that everything in his life had been leading up to even though he couldn't possibly know it at the time. Same as the Program had been for him, for Daniel, for Carter, for Teal'c. Maybe there'd be rewards to offset the losses.

And maybe he should shut the damn locker door in his head and focus on the road in front of him.

 

&gt; &gt; &gt;

 

It was always at her place. Never at hotels. Visit your ex in her home, you were just visiting your ex -- deliver a support check, shoot the shit, fix that leaky faucet for her. Hook up with her in a hotel and it blared AFFAIR at anyone keeping tabs, made them wonder why you were trying to hide it and what else you might be hiding, like how much you might have told her beyond what you were cleared to divulge after an alien crystal impersonated you and your dead kid and nearly being electrocuted was the least of it for her. They didn't need to know that you quit writing the checks after the fifth one she returned fresh from the cross-cut shredder and quit making deposits to the joint account you'd never closed after the third thank-you note from the charity she donated the funds to in your name. They didn't need to know that she was a better plumber than you were, a better carpenter, a better mechanic, and she was the one you'd call for a fix-it job _you_ couldn't handle. If you wound up shooting the shit over a bottle of wine or three at her place, no big deal if you sacked out on the sofa and left for work from there in the morning. Visit your ex in her home, and you were just visiting your ex. Even if she wasn't your ex, because those papers never got signed. Even if it was an affair, because nobody knew, and you evaded questions about your activities and whereabouts so that nobody would.

"It's stupid," he said, on his back with an arm draped around her. Dinner eaten, dishwasher chugging away in the kitchen, wine bottle out with the recycling; second, more leisurely round of sex over, condom disposed of, dessert-and-a-movie or more-sex-and-then-sleep still TBD. The first round of sex had been in the kitchen with the takeout still bagged on the counter and their clothes a breadcrumb trail from the front door. Her bed was hard; she'd always liked a firmer mattress than he did. Her legs were long and warm, her breasts deliciously smushed into his rib cage. Sandy hair tickled his ear, but he didn't move his head. "I should just tell them."

He was continuing a conversation, the way they did, picking up strands of dialogue hours or days later. Over Szechuan she'd related a funny anecdote about freaking out a nosy woman at the drugstore by cryptically whispering that her marital status was classified, and he'd mentioned the near-slip with his team. "A little absurd maybe," she said, swirling a finger around his nipple. "The whole affair-with-your-own-spouse thing. But not stupid. We've always played our personal lives pretty close to the vest. I'm a worse offender than you are."

"I'm not hiding this," he said. "Not deliberately. I'm not ashamed of this."

As he said it he heard how it would sound -- like a vow to stop hiding it, like overcompensating denial of the truth. But she heard it the way he meant it, as worry and reassurance. As long as he said _something_, he'd found, she usually did.

She stroked soothingly along his collarbone. "It's very gallant of you to feel bad about not announcing that I matter to you. But I know I do. I honestly don't care if anyone else knows. So it's OK."

She didn't treat him like one of her assignments, ask the leading headshrinky question, say, _So you haven't felt comfortable mentioning it. Why do you think that is?_

He'd have liked to be able to answer that question. He had some idea where the urge came from -- leftover guilt from the undercover op, caving to their allies' demand that he keep his team in the dark, another mistake he'd never make again and another one he was still paying for -- but he didn't know what stopped him. And he didn't know why she thought it was OK. Enabling his pigheadedness about privacy because she loved him and she shared it, averse to having to deal with his unit or socialize with his superiors, wanting no part of the military side of his life that Charlie had worshipped, clinging to the illusion that for the few hours they were alone the world of responsibilities and attachments outside their playhouse didn't exist ... none of those were _her_. She'd changed, some, since Charlie. But not like that. Neither of them were who they were before it happened or who they were right after, but neither of them had changed that much.

She'd never been threatened by his bond with any unit he was in. She'd like his CO and she'd like his team, and if that was a problem -- if she didn't want to risk a repeat of what happened with Cromwell, what happened with Woods and Burke and Cindy and Hilary, the messy meltdowns of the tight little beer-and-backyard-barbecue families that happened years before their own nuclear catastrophe -- she knew she could keep it professionally cordial. And Charlie and the military, well ... she'd badgered and ordered and finally begged him to take the kid to the range, train him in firearm safety, teach him about guns instead of forbidding them, and Jack had flat refused because he didn't want any part of that brutal world touching his family, because he thought the kid would follow the rules, _do as he was told_, because he thought he'd hidden the key and the ammunition too cleverly, because he fatally misjudged how much of himself there was in his son -- but she didn't blame him and she didn't blame the military that made him the way he was, and he still didn't understand that, still didn't understand how she could possibly not blame him when he would never stop blaming himself, but he accepted that she didn't, and had slowly accepted that she still wanted to be with him. Sometimes.

"You matter more to me than this. I don't want a mistress."

"I've always been your mistress. You're married to your job."

"Not true. So not true. God, honey, is that what you think? Did you always think that?"

"Not really. But it's safer that way. Easier." Her finger played connect-the-dots with the freckles on his shoulder. "Do we have to define it? Can't we just let it be what it is?"

It was a one-night thing at first, after he helped her move to the Springs when she got the job at the Veterans Outreach Center on South Tejon. They closed up the house, found homes for the things of Charlie's they didn't keep, found buyers who weren't put off by the tragedy of the place and seemed like they'd be happy there and would respect Charlie's memory. Then there was another night, and another ... and then she'd hit the Pause button, said she needed time to sort some stuff out. She jacked in the job at the Center, found some civil-service thing. They stayed in touch. Talked on the phone. Had dinner out now and then, hugged goodnight, went their separate ways. He knew she was seeing other people; he didn't think there was anyone serious but he never asked. Months went by like that. The next time they went out, they wound up reminiscing about all the reasons they used to prefer to eat in, and she said, "What do you say we get that order to go? Come home with me, if you want to. If you're free. Stay the night." He wanted to. He was free. He started staying the night once a month, then twice a month; since he'd come back from Edora, it was as close to once a week as his irregular schedule allowed. He didn't know what it meant. He didn't know what they were, what this was. He didn't know what she'd done those three months he was gone, what she'd thought, whether she'd called the base to find out. He'd shown up after the long absence and she'd grabbed him hard and said, "Dammit, Jack," and that was it. No questions, nothing.

"They need to know to contact you, Sare."

"They already know. They've always known. They always do. You don't know that?"

"They do?"

"Wow," she said. "He actually ... huh."

He looked down at her, arched an eyebrow.

"I asked your CO not to tell you'd he'd come to see me. Given that he came to see me because they thought you were _dead_, there was kind of a big assumption there. I thought he dismissed the request as the wishful blind optimism of a deluded woman and forgot about it. Obviously you did come back. I'm surprised he remembered and respected my wishes."

"When was this?"

"That particular time was when you came back with the broken bones and frostbite. But what do you think it says that you even had to ask? They declared you MIA four months ago and here you are. I've gotten the calls about you and the visits about you more times than I can count. OK, I _can_ count them, but my point is that yes they contact me, we never filed the papers and I'm still on record as the party to notify."

Jack shifted. Damn bed was like a rock. Should he apologize for the hassle involved in being his next-of-kin? Apologize for not even knowing that she still got those calls and visits? There was no one else. Some cousins out East somewhere he hadn't seen since they were kids. His parents and their generation were all gone. Should he thank her? Should he offer to change it?

"It's OK, Jack. It's not the trauma it used to be and I'd rather be the one to take care of things in the event of. When Frank came to the house and said they lost you in Iraq, _that_ nearly killed me. When West came to the house in '96, I told him not to write you off so fast, and then I threw him out, because he was an asshole and because I'd washed my hands of you. Except you didn't wash off, you sticky bastard."

He didn't go for the jokey comeback, didn't say anything about grape juice or Sharpies. He didn't say anything.

She nudged his ankle with her toes. "Your General Hammond's a lot more courteous," she said gently. An offer to let the subject drop.

He said, "Next time might be the event of."

She didn't opt for flippant either; she didn't say _So what else is new?_ She said, "I know." She said, "And that could be why you haven't told your team about us."

He understood right away, but he took a while to think about it. Finally he said, trying it on for size to see if it fit better than it did in his head, "Because that would make it real."

"Yes."

"But it is real."

"Very real, in its way. But making things official has significance for you. It's important to you. It changes things. This can be a happy daydream as long as it's not official. You say 'I'm back with my ex' out loud to somebody who matters to you, it becomes Official. And then you're officially risking both our lives when you go out there."

_'I'm back with my ex.'_ The words tumbled down into him, into his belly. _Was_ he back with his ex? Did his ex think he was back with his ex, or did she just think he thought he was? He said, "You're not my ex."

"You're avoiding the point."

Her hair was tickling his ear again. He stroked it down. "You never cared whether we got married. I'm the one who pushed for it. So you'd get survivor benefits. So you'd have right of access when I was laid up and so they'd have to notify you. So they'd have to treat you with that respect."

"And so they did. And do."

"Because we never signed those papers. Because the divorce was never official."

She elbowed up to get a better look at him. "Is this about going steady?"

"What?"

"You're afraid of the embarrassment if you tell your team we're involved again and then one of them sees me out and about with -- "

"No," he said sharply. In truth he didn't know. Maybe. It felt like it might be something like that. But --

"OK, how about this for an admission: I'm not seeing anyone else. I don't want to see anyone else. I tried and it didn't work and I gave up while you were MIA. It's you or nothing, at least until we quit for good or you actually do get killed, and probably then too, but hopefully I won't find out. Does that help or just put more pressure on you?"

He hadn't slept with anyone else on Earth since he met her. His two fuckups offworld were harsh reminders that she was It for him. He needed to tell her what happened. He needed to tell her everything that had happened for the last three years. He'd never felt that in all the years they were married before. He didn't know what to do with it. Telling her would be selfish. It would put her at risk. He wouldn't hurt her and piss her off and endanger her just to unburden himself. His issues, his problem. But he didn't want to be alone with this anymore. He didn't want to keep closing those locker doors. He wanted it all to be one locker. He didn't know what to do with that either. And telling her everything would mean everything. _I tried and it didn't work and I gave up while you were MIA._ Wasn't that close enough to how it had been for him? Or was a miss as good as a mile?

He tried to answer her question. "I'm -- glad. I ... wasn't sure."

"So be sure." She sank down again, wrapped around. It felt like being wrapped in a piece of himself, her skin as familiar as his own skin. "You're my steady. That's enough for me."

_You're mine too. Always have been. Except. And because._ He had to tell her. Not to confess, not for absolution, but because he couldn't have her committing to something when she didn't have all the information. "God, Sara. It's so ... it's complicated."

"Yeah. Here too. Always is, isn't it?"

"There are things ... there's stuff I need to tell you."

"Here too. It'll keep for a bit."

He didn't know if it would. Not his side of it.

She snuggled in and he hugged her closer, laid his free arm along her arm, closed his hand on her biceps, thumbing the muscle under the smooth skin. He listened to the intermittent swish of traffic outside, pedestrian voices approaching and passing and receding, life and activity coming and going a few yards away while they cocooned up in this velvety darkness with its spill of light from the other room and its opaque blinds. His place was quieter, off the beaten path, nestled in a wooded subdivision; his bedroom window looked out on the garden, and the blinds let some outside light through.

"_Are_ we back together, Sare? Are we?"

She went tense, slim body stringing wire-tight. "Don't jinx it, Jack. Please don't jinx it. It's good that people don't know. If fewer people knew we had a son it would have saved me a lot of misery trying to make them feel better about how there was nothing they could do. It's better that they don't know. It's better if we don't say it."

"_That's_ why I didn't tell them today," he said, suddenly, too loudly. "Christ. That's why, right there." He was happy about it. He was _happy about this_. First time in his _life_ he'd had an urge to share something like that with teammates, friends, family, anyone -- that was damned happy. But the happiness was safe inside him, and if he let it out it became a vulnerability. "If I tell them and then you walk away I'll have to deal with all their shit. Commiserations, trying to cheer me up, god forbid trying to _set_ me up ... "

She pushed off the mattress and brought her legs around and sat cross-legged, staring at him. "I'm not the one who's going to walk away."

"Well, it sure isn't me."

"It was the last time."

"Like hell. I came back and you were gone. Locks changed, note on the door with a lawyer's number?"

"Yes. You came back, because you always do. You came back because _you're the one who walked away_. You walked out on me when you took that mission."

He stared back at her for a long time. Her eyes were hard, assessing. Astonished, not outraged. It was the kind of rapid-fire argument they used to burst into laughter at the end of, couple of kids saying "I asked you first" and "I asked you last" and "Did not" and "Did too." She wasn't laughing. She was looking straight into his eyes and seeing how he saw it, how he'd seen it all this time. And now he got it too. How it had looked from her side of the fence. His basic operating assumption was that they'd separated because she left him. That she understood that he wanted her back, that it was her decision. _My wife left me_ was as ingrained as _I work for the Air Force_ and _You drop stuff, it falls down_.

He'd been to places where stuff fell up, and sometimes stuff never fell at all.

"Fuck," he said softly.

"Yeah," she said.

"Where does that leave us?"

"It leaves us sitting naked in my bed talking about things we'd be a lot safer letting alone. Two confused muleheaded scared-to-death people with no plans to walk away."

He sat up too, pivoted on his butt and dragged a leg around to the other side of her so he could stretch both legs over her thighs, close his knees on her sides, hook his calves around her, pull himself in close. He took her hands, and she briefly freed one to reach between her shins and his groin and scoop his genitals up to rest more comfortably on the hard bone. She put the hand on his knee. She let him keep the other hand; he rubbed his thumb into her palm, massaged her knuckles with his fingertips. It was all half-thoughtless contact, so many years with each other's bodies that they barely thought about it, but he was aware of it, aware of what it said in and of itself, and he knew she was too. She never stopped looking straight at him. He never stopped looking back.

He said, "That sounds kinda back-together to me."

"Yeah," she said. "Me too." Her eyes went from hard to pained to soft. She touched his jaw, let her hand fall. "We never broke up. We fell apart."

_And floated around in free fall,_ he thought. Because all the gravity was gone.

"So we're like old clothes." He took the fallen hand and brought it to his mouth, kissed the knuckles. "We've been stitching up the seams. Now we decide if we want to wear ourselves again."

She gave him her patented _oh, it's so much funnier than that, my friend_ face. "More like old furniture and we've been banging ourselves back together."

"So to speak," he said, finally smiling at her.

"As it were," she said, finally smiling back, and then they were two naked people sitting in her bed touching each other, running hands over faces and shoulders and legs as if they had to find the shape of each other again after groping through pitch-blackness to get here, both thinking they were crossing a minefield, two idiots on a perfectly solid level piece of ground groping blindly towards each other because with a history like theirs who wouldn't take the minefield for granted?

"So we're furnishing a new house with ourselves?" he said, taking the risk, pushing.

"Dangerous territory there, bud."

"I'm doing a recon. That's what I do."

"Oh yeah?" The muted laughter in her eyes had taken on a wicked sparkle that told him she was done with the heavy moving for now and a lot more interested in that banging-back-together thing. She took hold of his hand and moved it down and between her legs. "Recon this."

He investigated with his fingers, found her wet inside, spread the wetness around. She arched when he pushed two fingers in, and he supported her back with his free arm. He rubbed with his fingertips, exploring the complex topography, the spongy folds and furrows of a passageway that felt so smooth and muscular around his cock. He could never recognize the spot by touch, but she gasped when his fingers curled into it, and he felt her open up deep inside, that incredible welcoming dilation that begged to be filled. He slid his thumb up to her clit, swirling lightly, and her thighs started to tremble and she gripped his shoulders hard.

It was amazing to watch her come like this, watch the lines deepen around her eyes and smooth across her brow, see her mouth tighten, see the gleam of her teeth. She was fierce and feral in orgasm, head thrown back; when he licked her and sucked her, her cries were high and soft, but when she came around penetration she groaned from the chest, a sexual growl that burned down into his groin. He rocked his hand between fingers and thumb, harder the harder her fingers dug into his shoulders, and she made that sound and spasmed around him, deep strong contractions.

"Yeah," he whispered, "yeah," and then her hand was on his neck and her mouth was on his mouth and he let his thumb fall away before it was too much, dropped his shoulder and curled his arm and pushed his fingers up as deep as he could get them so she could grind on him.

"Now," she said against his mouth, between lip-bites, sips of breath. "Don't wait."

He slid his fingers out. Their legs were stacked wrong for him to flip her; he leaned over onto his side, reaching for the condoms, and she boosted herself up over his ankle to lie on her back. He rolled between her legs and over her with the packet in his mouth, braced on knees and one arm while he tore it open and got the rubber out and stroked it down over his dick. He entered her carefully, guiding himself, watching for the wince that would say he'd pushed in too fast. She moaned and threw her arms over her head, and there was no wince around her eyes, no twitch in her hips, just an effortless glide. He eased his upper body down onto her, small firm breasts and warm belly against him, head slotted in beside hers, faceful of hair that still smelled faintly of wheatgrass shampoo. He scooped up her thighs and rolled his lower back and within five thrusts was tumbling after her, coming into the last tremors of her orgasm.

Afterwards it was all he could do to push up off her and shift to the side and get rid of the rubber and sink down, gather her up, get covers over them. Old habit used to be that they both flaked out on their backs or she'd turn onto the side she slept on and he'd spoon up behind her, but she rolled to face him this time. It wasn't a very comfortable way to sleep, but the front of her felt so good, her face pressed into his neck was so sweet, and sleep dragged heavily at him. She was already out, clicked off like a light the moment he settled around her. He breathed deep, pulling the scent of her into him, the scent of her things in the room around them, and closed his eyes.

 

&gt; &gt; &gt;

 

He woke up in Sara's bedroom with Sara in his arms and the first thought that went through his head was _Move in with me. Get out of this dollhouse._ This rental was tiny. It really was like playing house when he came here. He knew why she'd picked it -- apartment-size without trapping her in an anthill, as different from the big Winter Park house as houses came, small enough to feel safe during a time when she'd been pulling her life in tight around herself -- but after improving to cozy it had graduated to constricting, and lately her job was getting more demanding and her coffee table wasn't cutting it after hours anymore. _Bring work home to the spare room. I wired it for an office and never hooked anything up in there._

He could have said it out loud. She was stirring now, giving a contented sigh to feel him in the bed with her, and they both woke up fast, clearheaded and functional. He didn't say it. It wasn't something you hit somebody with first thing. Pissed the crap out of her when he bulled in and tried to fix her "problems" for her. And truth was, he was scared to say it. Nervous. First-time butterflies. They'd lived together before they got married, but she'd found the place, convinced him to leave base housing, done all the legwork. He'd never invited a girlfriend to live with him.

Closest he'd ever come was a few weeks ago with Laira, the words "Come with me" forced out through a wince, and it wasn't close at all. They'd both known it was a courtesy offer he felt obliged to extend, that hiding the walkie was more than he could forgive, prioritizing possession of him over the return of her own people to their home. They'd both known that she wouldn't abandon them a second time. They'd started lives elsewhere, aided by the SGC personnel who aided that stuff, and for all the support they got, none of them had been happy. She wouldn't have been happy. He wouldn't have given up Sara. And Sara would have embraced her, helped her -- put aside all the issues that would have stopped anyone else, fidelity and fertility and all, brought all her professional and personal resources to bear on making Earth livable for this woman her husband knocked up when their kid was gone and they couldn't have any more. Because she'd made a career of that kind of thing when she worked for witness protection. Because that was the kind of person she was.

He thought about Nyan again. About Teal'c, and Cassie, and Daniel, about exiles and refugees and relocations. People who started over with nothing because they'd lost everything, given up everything. Lives a hundred light-years away down a meteor crater, an old missile silo.

He didn't know if he could ask her to leave her life and relocate to his. He thought that might be what she'd done when she'd married him. He didn't know if he'd be asking her to do it again. He didn't know anything about her friends or the people she worked with. He didn't know anything about her life. He didn't know if she'd want him bulling into it.

He hugged her harder, nuzzled into her hair, inhaled deeply. He'd been such an idiot. Such a weak, blindered idiot. Fine, he hadn't known where he stood with her. But he'd chosen to believe he'd never get home. He'd given up instead of trusting his team to find a way, trusting Daniel to get their allies to come pick him up in a year or two years or five, trusting Carter and Hammond and Teal'c to do something just like what they wound up doing, remembering that buried gates could be unburied, Daniel had done it, he should have done it, should have kept digging, three months, he could have dug it out even while he was helping them rebuild, saved them digging the hole from the inside, saved Teal'c risking his life. Mistake after mistake, all coming down to that choice to believe it was hopeless.

He'd believed it was hopeless when he walked out on her the first time. He'd given up instead of trusting her to be there when he came back this time.

He was hugging her too hard. She didn't protest. She hugged back, throwing a hand down over his hip and squeezing him in tighter. God, he loved the wiry strength of her. All that willowy girlishness, long limbs and grace and soft skin, and inside it the strongest person you'd ever meet. He loved her face, because it was the other way round: a strong-boned sculpture of intelligent fortitude that age was beautifully etching with wisdom and character, but with a soft glow when she was with him, when she was happy -- youthful spirit shining through.

He'd checked on Edora after the undercover op, after the red herring about relocating there. Laira's period had come and gone. He was a little sorry, and a lot relieved, and not surprised: one night, one time, not much of a shot. She'd taken in several Edoran children orphaned in the meteor strike. He said he'd continue to visit, as promised, and she said they were getting plenty of help from his people and it didn't need to be him. She said it was better if it wasn't him.

_It's good that people don't know. It's better if we don't say it._

Sara drew breath, then didn't speak.

"Say it," he said, low and easy against her ear.

"I wish I could wake up like this every day." She rubbed his thigh with her thumb, then rolled onto her back, staying in the circle of his arm. "Now forget I said it."

"I'll move in here," he said.

She laughed. "You wouldn't fit. I barely fit."

"I mean it. All I need's a fridge and a TV set."

"And a walk-in closet, and two chests, and a cellar and an attic for all your camping crap and sports crap -- "

"I'll store it. When do I ever use it? I'm serious, Sara."

"Yeah, way not to tell everyone, Jack."

"Then come live with me."

"And the first time I answer the phone, or someone stops by?"

"I'll tell them today. I wanted to tell them yesterday. Now I know why I didn't. Screw that. You tell me it's OK with you, I tell them first thing."

"Jack ... "

"If you don't want this, I won't push. But I want this. I want you back. I'm not giving up on us this time." He stopped his mouth while his brain kept going, running scenarios, making arrangements. Her life wasn't his to organize. They both ate logistics for breakfast. The options were clear. It was her choice. He wouldn't push.

"Jack, there are things you don't know."

He waited, listening.

"One of them might really piss you off."

He considered that, took a deep breath. "Yeah. Here too. You too."

"We can't really do this now. I'm not on shift 'til this afternoon but it's nearly eight and you must -- "

"Shit. Really?" He twisted to look at the clock. Damn blinds. What the hell happened to the clock in his head? "Shit. Where's my phone?"

A jangling unfamiliar chime sounded on the nightstand.

He looked over, blank and stupid, and said, "That's not my phone."

"Nooo," she said patiently, reaching for it, "that's mine. Try your jacket, it's on the couch. Go, call, shower." Into the phone, she said, "Doctor Schaefer speaking."

He mouthed 'sorry,' she waved him away, he rolled to his feet. As he went out for his phone he could hear her side of the conversation, the creak of floor under her feet and the sound of a drawer opening and closing, the closet door opening and closing. A familiar "Hi," a pause, an "Oh no, I'm so sorry," a longer pause, a couple of "Uh-huh"s and an "Oh, boy," and then "Of course. ... No, it's OK. ... " Whatever came after that he lost as the base switchboard answered. He identified himself and asked to be put through to Doctor Jackson as he hunted up his pants. By the time Daniel picked up, he'd picked up his shoes and the rest of the clothes that had scattered last night.

Sara was on the phone to someone else when he went through to the bathroom. She waved a hand for his attention and pointed to the briefs and socks and shirt laid out at the foot of the bed. He caught hold of the hand and kissed the finger -- didn't push in close to kiss down into her neck to distract her, they didn't play games like that -- and got himself showered as fast as he could given the annoyance of shower gel instead of bar soap, and separate shampoo and conditioner. Extra twenty minutes to the base from here; if he'd been home he'd have made it easily, but if he'd been home the light would have cued him to the time, or his alarm would have gone off.

No. He _was_ home. He just needed his own alarm clock.

She came in as he was shaving with one of her disposable razors, and showered as fast as he had; he was only half dressed when the high drone of the blowdryer cut off and she came out to dress beside him.

"Thought you weren't on shift this morning," he said when she pulled a slacks-and-blazer set out of the closet.

"Yeah, about that," she said, and he said "It's fine, I'm not prying" and she said "You're _not_ prying, you're allowed to ask, Jack, now listen to the answer." He said "Never mind, sorry I said anything" and she said "Which is why you usually don't, and can now be one of those times?"

"Crap, deodorant," he said, and went back into the bathroom. "I'm listening!" he called while he pulled some kind of organic stick out of the medicine cabinet. The flowery label loudly proclaimed that it was aluminum-free but said nothing about being fragrance-free. "Wait, is this stuff gonna make me smell funny?" He gave it a sniff, couldn't decide whether it was more like paraffin or citronella.

Coming into the bathroom doorway, she said, "It's scentless. Jack, I need you to focus here."

"I'm sorry, baby, I'm just really late for my nine hundred -- "

"And I can assure you that your nine hundred is exactly as late as you are."

He paused in the middle of rolling the stick under his right armpit.

She looked back at him calmly, buttoning her blouse by feel, waiting.

Business-casual clothes. The phone call that sounded like it was from someone pleading illness and asking her to cover. The phone call after that, her tone professional, making some kind of arrangements for access. Her years working in after-care for Witness Security in Denver. Her MSW, the PhD in psych counseling she went for when Charlie started school and finished right before the accident. The social-services job she'd been doing since she left the Vet Center, the work he'd assumed was for a city agency but she'd never actually said.

The social worker assigned to Nyan's case when the Air Force granted him refugee status.

"You," he said.

"It was supposed to be Marc Taylor, but that was him just now, family emergency, so yes, for this morning it's me. Because it's also _you_, he'll handle the case once he's back. But I can take some information. Get the ball rolling."

"You're his supervisor."

"Administrator. I created the division. We have the same level of expertise and clearance. Call him a colleague. There are three of us. Elena Vargas is offworld right now."

"You created a social-services division _where I work_."

"Actually our offices are in the Academy Hospital. Right down the hall from your buddies the psychologists."

"And this was the thing you were going to tell me before we shacked up and you thought might really piss me off."

"Yup."

She'd finished tucking in her blouse and belting her slacks. He capped the deodorant and put it back on the shelf and closed the medicine cabinet. Caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror, pale and harsh, even downright scary. She'd told him once that when she announced she was pregnant he'd looked pissed as hell, and if she hadn't known that was his gobsmacked expression, she'd have flipped her lid.

He turned for the door. She'd gone back to sit on the bed and was bent down rolling a knee-high over her foot. He went out and grabbed his shoes and sat down beside her to put them on. The socks clashed, but they were what she'd had in the drawer for him. "And the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is ... "

"I never lied to you. We never discussed our work, you never asked me straight out. I didn't tell you because I didn't trust you not to pull strings to queer my deal before I even got it off the ground. I had to prove myself -- prove there was a need and I could address it, prove to myself I could do it without our history compromising my objectivity -- before you got to take a shot at me because I was breathing too close down your neck."

"Thanks so much for the vote of confidence." He pushed his other shoe on and snugged the laces before tying them. "I don't have strings in that department. The question wasn't why you didn't tell me -- "

"You barely know that department _exists_. Your mission ends, you're done, you leave the follow-up to other people. That's fine, that's how it works. But it didn't mean you couldn't throw your weight around if you got wind of it and decided I was too close for comfort." She had both stockings on now and was slipping her feet into low pumps. "On the bright side, you'll barely know I'm there." She snagged the blazer two-fingered and got up slinging it on. "And we are now a good quarter-hour late, so -- "

Jack's phone rang with the ringtone assigned to calls from the base. He looked at her. She shrugged. He pulled it out of his jacket and flipped it open. "O'Neill."

"Jack, the social worker we were going to meet with -- "

"Is running late, I know. Can you push the meeting to ten?"

"Yes, but what I'm trying to tell you is that it's not the guy we scheduled it with, and this is kind of a crappy way to break this to you, but I think you should know before you -- "

"I know who it is, Daniel. How much _you_ knew about this is something I'll take up with you later."

"At very high volume, I'm sure."

"Earsplitting. Teal'c talk to the kid?"

"Nyan's very grateful but he wants to experience life on the surface. Wait -- your thing last night -- "

"Yes. In every sense your annoyingly brilliant mind is probably extrapolating. You tell anyone and you're a dead man."

"Yeah, I get that a lot. See you at ten."

Out in the living room, Sara was sliding her notebook computer into a carrybag. Clues everywhere, he thought, remembering the night he'd tried to use that machine to check something online and found it locked down as tight as ... well, any SGC consultant's. "Forty-five-minute reprieve," he said.

"Great," she said. She slung her purse on, slung the carrybag on, stood up, faced him. "Buy you breakfast?"

"Sure," he said, then tossed his keys and smiled. "Drive you to work?"

 

&gt; &gt; &gt;

 

The morning was cool, and with the windows up the cab of the truck filled with the rich scents of coffee and ham-and-cheese croissants from the drive-through. Jack had pulled over at the foot of Norad Road. The entrance to the Cheyenne Mountain facility was ten minutes up the switchback in case his phone -- or hers -- rang with an urgent summons. Better than doing this in the parking lot up there.

On the way he'd briefed her on Nyan. Capitalize on the opportunity, save time in the meeting; she was familiar with the case but didn't have the benefit of the prep the caseworker had done. Talking shop with her was right up there with the strangest experiences he'd had on alien worlds -- and a profound relief, and, he had to admit, really pretty fucking cool. While he gave her his take on the Bedrosians and answered her questions, she read through the file on the notebook in her lap. He didn't like her reading in the truck -- passenger reaction time could be almost as important as driver reaction time if something came out of the blue, he was kind of a dick about vehicular safety and thought her attention should be on the road too -- but he wouldn't have hassled anyone from the job about it ... anyone else from the job ... so he didn't hassle her. Now the notebook was closed and providing a tray table for her breakfast.

He wanted to tell her she was amazing and he loved her like hell and admired the crap out of her and he was a little freaked out but more delighted than pissed. But they were closer to the job now than they were to home.

Chewing the last bite of his food, he said, "What clearance level _do_ you have, by the way?"

"Is this where you unsubtly grill me to find out how many of your deep dark secrets I know? Or accuse me of getting this job so I could keep tabs on you?"

"If it were, this would be where you break it to me that the cosmos is not in fact JackO'Neillcentric."

"I don't read all the reports I have access to. I filter on my need to know as well as what they think I need to know. The many _other_ units and missions and cases keep me too busy to stalk you even if I were inclined to." She looked out the window, couple of joggers in Academy T-shirts, scruffy guy with a guitar case on his back walking two Rottweilers and a standard poodle that looked like an animated topiary. "I get curious. I handle it as professionally as I can."

"There's a lot more I can tell you now. Beyond what I'd have told you anyway." His voice dropped. "I want to tell you. I've wanted to for a long time."

"Can I come over tonight? So we can save it for then?"

"God. Of course."

"OK. So what _was_ the million-dollar question?"

"Sixty-four thousand."

"Inflation's a bitch. So?"

He let out a short laugh, releasing the tension. "How the hell you wangled a gig in an absolutely airtight operation."

"I put two and two together, from what you told me after the incident with your double, and figured there might be a need for what I can do."

"That doesn't explain how you got in."

"I never got in. I've never been in that facility. Interviews and sessions take place at the hospital, home visits take place in people's homes."

He looked over at her: _Come on._

She folded her croissant wrapper twice, smoothed the edges, put it in the bag, centered her coffee cup over the manufacturer's logo on the notebook. "After Charlie, I couldn't work, I couldn't do anything, I didn't want to do anything. We're all exiles from our own past, but I was an exile from my _life_, and there was nobody to help relocate me, nowhere I wanted to go. You left, so I left, but there was ... nothing out there. I thought going back to the house would help, but it made me into a ghost. Even when Dad came and stayed. Charlie wasn't haunting the place -- I was. After the thing with the crystal entity, I ... woke up, a little. Wanted to work again. Wanted to close up that shrine and go back out into the world and do something useful in it -- be alive again. I had the doctorate, I had the administrative qualifications, I had a concept of what I wanted to do, but the best I could find was at the Vet Center and that wasn't it. Then you came back and told me who you really had by the hand that night, and that you'd taken him home to his planet, and I thought, Sometime there's going to be one who can't go home. Somebody who knows something about this stuff should be there to help. And that's when I came back to life."

Seven years working with people who'd left everything they knew, started from scratch in a strange place, kept their secrets to stay alive, and then were cut loose with a six-week phase-out, sent back into the world to fend for themselves, sometimes relocated _again_, no marshals looking after them anymore, only people like Sara doing the best they could with the resources they had. He'd never known she'd become one of them, or how profoundly he'd left her behind. But the last two of those seven years were with him, and he knew how good she'd been at that job, and he knew how frustrated she'd been with the disparity between what was needed and what she could provide. "You were the perfect somebody."

She shot him a sharp glance, looking for sarcasm. He shot back an _I'm serious, go on_ face, and she said flat-out, "I was the perfect candidate for a job that, as far as I could tell from what you told me, didn't exist. Master's in community social work, buttload of classified experience with the federal government, the PhD to qualify me for counseling and administration because I wanted the long end of the stick for a change. Yeah, I was that somebody. And I knew where to find other people who were too. I just had to find the people to pitch it to."

"You couldn't just ask me."

"And have you say no way? Or clam up and then go 'take care of it' behind my back? You were different then, Jack. We were both different."

Yeah, he was kind of a hardass in those days, not above interfering and telling himself it was for her own good, not as flexible in his thinking as he got as that first year wore on. OK with his unit being a mishmash of military and civilian, Terran and extraterrestrial, scientist and non-scientist, nowhere near understanding that the whole Program was that kind of composite. Focused on the frontline gate teams, not much thought for the extensive support they were getting or how much more they'd need. Experience and Hammond had taught him a few things since then, but even now he had his hands full, not much attention to spare for the personnel who picked up the pieces. And he had a career-long aversion to psychologists, military or civilian. He'd had issues with her entering that doctoral program. Suspicions about her doing it to get inside _his_ head. He never voiced an objection out loud, but she'd known. Damned good grounds all around, he thought. He said, "Yeah."

"So the director of the Vet Center retired. I had my eye on the job in a kind of yeah-whatever way. I went to the party out of respect and to do some glad-handing, and I ran into a clinical psychologist I knew from WitSec. A trauma counselor who used to work at the intake end, evaluating and counseling people when they entered the Program, victims and murder witnesses and so on. We chatted sociably, but I spent too many years around you and people in your line of work to miss the signs. Whatever work she was doing, it was some kind of classified. I took her number and the next week I invited her out for a bag lunch in the park. It wasn't hard to guess that she might be involved with your operation. It _was_ hard to broach the subject, because I wasn't sure about her and neither of us could talk about it. I alluded to a vague hypothetical case of an orphan child from really _really_ far away, and a hypothetical institution that had no provision for such a child. She didn't give up a thing, perfect poker face, but the Cassandra Fraiser case had just happened and when she got back to work she alerted the people in charge that somebody might have slipped up. They checked up on me, found out my connection, came back to me for a serious talk. My division was funded and I brought in Marc and Elena. And now here we are."

"So when you called time out, when this ... thing, with us, first, ah ... "

"I was trying to get hired where you worked. I couldn't be involved with you even outside the job -- your people didn't care, but I did -- and I didn't want you to find out until I had my feet under me. Two years ago, this morning would have been a crisis for me -- you finding out, me with no one to hand the case off to or talk to about it, fears about my involvement with you compromising my objectivity. It's not a crisis now. Our caseload's been growing -- more new cases coming in, past cases staying on -- but so have the administrative demands, so I'm primarily admin now, which is what I was shooting for at the start. Anything that's a problem for me, Elena and Marc are just as qualified to handle. And you'd have your work cut out for you now, ousting me. Nobody there ever batted an eyelash over you. All they care about is chain of command. And I'm very good at what I do."

Call him a controlling, overprotective schmuck, but chances were he would have tried to put the kibosh on it. Still wasn't sure, even now, even if she had Hammond and three ranks of brass and a gaggle of Cassandras and every civilian on base and at the hospital standing up for her, that he wouldn't ...

"Crazy shit comes through that mountain, Sara. I don't -- " He shook his head, looked out the window. More joggers, civilians this time. Girl on a ten-speed, bookbag, long hair streaming, no goddamn helmet.

"What," she said. "Say it."

"I don't want that touching you."

He was so sure she would say "Too late" that he heard the words in his head -- _Too late, it already nearly fried me and nearly brought a building down on my head and nearly broke what was left of my heart and I'm still here, as long as I'm someone you care about I'll be at risk of fallout from that place, I'll take my chances same as you, you're not the only one who gets to put himself on the line for work he believes in, this is who I am, this is who I was when you met me, I wasn't the studious parent you got used to coming home to and I'm not the broken woman you left standing in the kitchen that day_ ...

She didn't say those words. She said, "You know, I didn't just use my pregnancy as an excuse to get out of a job the bureaucracy wasn't letting me _do_. I didn't tell you this back then because I thought you'd think I was losing it, but part of the reason I left WitSec was that I was afraid that if I handled some ex-mafioso wrong, it would put my child at risk, and my badass black-ops husband wouldn't be there to stop the reprisal, the kidnapping ... That part wasn't supposed to touch me. I'm a social worker, not a U.S. Marshal. When I got them post-discharge, all that stuff was supposed to be done. But it was never done, and when it wasn't just me at stake, when it wasn't even just me and you, I couldn't afford the risk anymore. It's different now. WitSec is different. But crazy shit comes through that program, and in those days ... Well. I hear you, Jack."

It wasn't the words, it wasn't the reciprocity, it was the recognition that hit him like a punch in the gut. Why he had that fucking firearm in the house. Exactly why he had that fucking sidearm in the house instead of safe in a weapons locker on base. In case somebody he screwed over downrange got a bead on his identity. In case somebody came after his family.

_You hated that entity getting into your head,_ she'd said back when he'd told her about the crystal. _Going through your things. Finding out about me. It was all your worst nightmares rolled into one._

He said, "Yeah." Fumbling, hoarse, as if he were losing his voice, onset of speech impairment, he said, "I hear you too." He was trying to say _I never knew, I never told you either, it was the same_ and there was something like an explosion in his skull and what burst out of him was "I'd have kept a fucking arsenal in that house if it weren't for the k-- "

He choked on the 'k.' She jerked her head to the side, as if something had blown up on the sidewalk, but her hand groped over and found his sleeve and twisted. He was trying to crush the gear shift in his fist; his foot had floored the brake with all the power of his leg behind it and he was pushed back in the seat. It was like the moment right before a crash, rendered in life-size marble.

He took a breath. She let go of his sleeve. He eased off the pedal and let go of the gear shift. She curled her hand around her coffee cup. He balled up his croissant wrapper, took the lid off his cup, stuffed the wrapper into the remains of the coffee, put the lid back on, put it in the cup holder.

"But maybe I learned something from that," he said quietly. "Maybe I wouldn't have opposed it."

"I hear you about the bad stuff," she said, just as quietly. "But you'd be keeping all the good stuff from touching me too."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah."

She tipped her cup to pour the last drops of coffee into her mouth, swallowed, and said, "It's twenty of."

"Yeah."

"How long to get through the checkpoint?"

"We should go."

"Any more questions?"

"Some. They'll keep. You?"

"I'd like an estimate of how pissed off you are."

He shook his head, then turned to her, suddenly and intensely enough that she blinked and raised her brows. "I'm delighted. You're amazing. I admire the crap out of you. It doesn't end for me when the mission ends. Not anymore. We're lucky to have you. And I love you."

 

&gt; &gt; &gt;

 

In the briefing room, Nyan greeted her eagerly and took to her right off the bat. Carter hid her surprise and curiosity well -- she remembered Sara from the Winter Park hospital, but the surname and the title and the context threw her -- and Daniel's _See? I didn't spill it_ flick of the eyes was visible to no one but Jack. Teal'c started off gracious but reserved, relaxed into interested and engaged, and graduated to eminently satisfied as he saw that Nyan was going to be in good hands.

After the preliminaries and official briefing, Sara asked if Nyan could show her to the mess so they could talk in a more informal setting, go over the residential options and cover stories the caseworker had prepared, exchange some more information to pass on to Marc when he returned to move the case forward. Left with his team, Jack said, "So on the off chance that you were wondering, yes that's my wife, yes she's been doing this for a while, yes we're seeing each other, yes it's OK for her to handle this much of a case involving my unit, and no it won't be happening often."

Carter said, "Um ... _seeing_ seeing, sir?"

_Should have made book,_ Jack thought. _Safe as houses._ Keeping his expression military-neutral, he said, "Yes, Carter. Seeing seeing. Since a few weeks after the crystal thing. I didn't want to jinx it by saying anything." He let a hint of the smile show. "It's going well."

He could see the equations and locations and virtual calendars spreadsheeting in her head, Antarctica and Argos and Edora and his something-like-a-date last night, the talk they'd had after Edora and what this meant that some things he'd said then had really meant. It took all of two seconds, one blink; she was fast, scary fast, genius fast.

"That's great, sir," she said, and cracked one of those boyish, brilliant smiles that could make your whole day.

"Indeed, O'Neill, this is fine news."

"And me, you'll have a word with later."

"Oh, I think right now would be just fine, Doctor Jackson ... "

Turned out Daniel had known almost from the start, because Daniel paid attention to support personnel and civilian staff and humanitarian-aid divisions, and because Daniel had helped with linguistic interpretation and cultural analysis when other refugees and asylum-seekers had been the fallout of other teams' missions. Sara had never sworn him to secrecy, he said, even when she did some initial work with him to see if the Edorans could be accommodated on Earth, before Taylor had found a more suitable planet and taken charge of the case; he'd just thought it was none of his business.

"She so swore you," Jack said. "You're covering for her."

"She really didn't," Daniel said. "She was either kind enough or devious enough not to put me in that position. She let me choose for myself. I did call you this morning."

"So when push came to shove, yeah yeah," Jack said. "Y'know, I'm starting to not feel so bad about that crap I pulled on you last month."

"Good," Daniel said, as if he'd been serious. "Because my grandmother always said that when you're the only one left in Feels Really Bad About It Land? It's time to start packing."

 

&gt; &gt; &gt;

 

In street clothes, Jack stood at his open locker, one hand on the door, looking down at the cigar box.

At midday he'd had an airman drive Sara to the hospital for her shift. Nineteen-thirty now; he was due to pick her up in half an hour.

He stared at the faded print on the wooden lid for another few seconds, then started to close the locker door, then stopped. He bent down, flipped the lid up, felt around among the snapshots. The worn, dinked gold circle felt cold and wrong when it came into his hand, like a familiar thing that wasn't, anymore; but when he straightened up and slipped it on, it slotted right into the dimple that had never completely smoothed out of his skin, molded comfortably around the bone, and quickly matched his body temperature, and it felt the same way it always had when he put it back on: as if it had never been off his finger.

He closed the steel door quietly, spun the lock, and turned. Teal'c stood a few feet behind him, hands clasped behind his back, watching in silence. His gaze didn't flick down to the ring, but he had the see-all-without-looking thing down pat, and Jack knew he'd taken note of it.

"Yeah, well," he said softly. "Whaddya gonna do."

The left edge of Teal'c's mouth ghosted towards a faint smile, and he inclined his body from the waist. Pretty deeply, actually. Huh.

Jack glanced down at his left hand, pushed it away and spread his fingers, somewhere between a just-got-engaged person trying to believe the rock was real and a fighter looking to see how bad the last scuffle had messed up his hand. When he looked up, Teal'c's eyes were bright with laughter. Jack huffed a soft laugh at himself, and then he was passing Teal'c with a slap on the shoulder that turned into a brief grip-and-shake before he reached for the locker-room door.

 

&gt; &gt; &gt;

 

That night, in front of the fire, he said, "It's your dream job, isn't it. It's like you were preparing for this your whole life with no way of knowing it."

She looked at him, surprised. "That's exactly what it is."

"For me too." He dug his spoon into the last of the ice cream, working it around hers to get at the few remaining nuts. She liked the praline flavor but not the pralines. To him the ice cream was a garnish. "Mrs. Sprat had no first name. That's really bad, right?"

"Mm-hm," she said -- smiling around a creamy mouthful that did things to him a frozen dessert had no business doing -- and then: "That mission saved your life, didn't it."

He nodded. He'd told her everything, from the start -- nuke to marriage cake to meteor strike. She'd already filled in most of the blanks where the women were concerned. He'd already known she had, from what Daniel had hinted. It was a relief to get it off his chest, and comfortingly anticlimactic, nowhere near the big deal he'd made it in his head. But she'd never understood why he accepted that mission, or what kind of mission it was, or why he came back changed. His duplicate hadn't been able to tell her that. He hadn't been able to tell her that, afterwards. Now he could. Now he had. That was a big deal.

"I never really believed in what you were doing," she said. "All those years. I never trusted the people who deploy our military. I _worked_ for the government and I never trusted them. I never liked the way they used people like you for their own corrupt ends. I believed in you, but not your job. I hated your job. I didn't realize all that time how much I hated about my own. How much that contributed to my resentment. To how I failed to be supportive. I told myself I was respecting your wishes, not treating you like one of my cases. I apologize for that." She dug the last spoonful from the container and fed it to him before he could tell her she had nothing to apologize for. "I believe in what you're doing now. And I believe in what I'm doing, too."

He put the spoon-rattling container down on the floor, then leaned back with her on the couch they'd moved to face the fireplace, arm thrown around her, hugging her close. "Me too."

It had never been a minefield. It was a postapocalyptic wasteland, the blasted-out wreck of their lives. They'd been wandering shellshocked through the ruins. Took a while to be able to hear again. See again. Sometimes it took other people needing you for what you could do, then later for who you were. Sometimes you could still find each other, when the smoke cleared. Sometimes you could see better than before. Sometimes the new place you found for yourselves was the same place.

"So will it be a problem for you?" she said. "If I work there, and live here?"

Jack's belly executed a textbook pitchback, banking into a half-loop and roll. Her phrasing took as granted everything they'd left hanging this morning: that he wanted her here, that she wanted to be here, that working there and living here wouldn't be a problem for her. "No," he said.

"What about if I apply for training in offworld deployment?"

Jack stayed very still, kept his voice very mild. "Why haven't you?"

"Because my specialty is helping extraterrestrial humans integrate into Terran society, and Marc and Elena were available to specialize in extraplanetary relocations. They both got rated and cleared, and so far that's covered it -- he works primarily with human populations, she handles cases involving other life-forms. And because if I never went through the gate I was less likely to run into you. I can give the stealth crap a rest now, but our caseload is growing and changing. Even if my request to hire more caseworkers is approved, it's going to come up."

She might need to go through that gate, for any number of professional reasons, at any time. She could get emergency clearance easily enough, but she should damn well be trained for it. And while he knew now that they were both personally familiar with the kind of displacement and relocation that weren't physical, it couldn't hurt to get a feel for what it was like to step from one planet to another. She'd worked with immigrants from countries she'd never been to, but she'd done a semester in Spain, a two-year tour in the Peace Corps, she'd traveled, she had some sense of their experience. Different planets felt different in ways that different countries didn't -- physiological ways, environmental ways, subliminal ways, differences in gravity and atmosphere and electromagnetism in addition to climate and language and culture -- and there was no mode of transportation on Earth that felt like the trip through a wormhole.

Blind terror for her safety ran head-on into exhilaration at the prospect of being able to share the most amazing experience in the universe with her. He'd probably never get to share it in person. He couldn't be responsible for her deployment or in command of any mission she went on. But, god, he wanted her to have it. He wanted her to know.

"No problem," he said.

She pulled her legs up and turned to tuck them into the curve of his body, rest her hands on her knees. The body language was easygoing and cuddly, but the stare he felt drilling into the side of his head was diamond-keen. "Really?"

_Who the hell would I trust with her?_ he thought, and _Not my call, that's the point,_ and _Any of them. Any blessed one of them. Only exception would've been Makepeace, and he's out._ He turned his face to her and smiled. "I'll get scared," he said. "I'll handle it as professionally as I can." He put his free hand over her hands, rubbed her knuckles. "I have a good role model."

She slipped her right hand out from under, and ran her finger over the worn gold band on his left. "So about this."

"Objections?"

"None whatsoever." She dropped her hand to fish in her pocket, came back with her own ring, displayed it on her palm. "Feel like doing the honors?"

"_Oh_ yeah," he said, and took it, and slid it down the ring finger of the hand she held out, seating it gently, firmly. Now it wasn't a smile but a grin, big and genuine and irrepressible: "Better than sex."

"I wouldn't go that far."

"OK, better than walking around with it in your _pocket_."

"It's been living in that little drawer in the jewelry case. I put it in my purse this morning when you were showering. It went into the pocket after you picked me up wearing yours."

"Long trip," he said.

"Long day," she said.

"Yeah," he said, and threaded his hand into her hair, and his fingers through her fingers, and settled in to enjoy the fire with her.

Hell of a day. But they were home now.

**Author's Note:**

> I love this pairing. I believe that the show would have been quietly but substantially strengthened if the writers had reconciled Jack and Sara after 'Cold Lazarus' and kept him solidly partnered throughout the series. If a third, Jack-centric movie is ever made, it would be impressively and movingly brave and cognizant of the screenwriter to reunite them, bringing their relationship -- and Jack -- full circle from the original movie and the series pilot.


End file.
